WHILE there is ferment in the Ukraine as nationalists seek to free it from Russian domination, there is pragmatic capitulation at 206 West 100th Street, where the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences has decided not to appeal its designation as a landmark last month.

Now the academy is making the best of the situation, applying for preservation grants and loans for its handsome little 1898 library building.

The New York Free Circulating Library was established in 1880 to serve the poor and working classes and gradually opened branches citywide. In 1896, quarters were rented at the southwest corner of 100th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. The 6,200 volumes there were in such demand that ''people would sit and wait until books were returned.''

In 1898, the library built a new branch at 206 West 100th Street, between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, a three-story Renaissance-style building designed by James Brown Lord.

Lord designed an elegant building of limestone, light-colored brick and terra cotta, with a projecting portico supporting a giant Ionic colonnade. The lower section is simple and restrained, ''modern'' for its time, but the upper two floors have a decorated, Victorian sensibility - the bull's eye windows have foliate surrounds and there is a precisely detailed anthemion band at the top.

E. Idell Zeisloft's 1899 ''The New Metropolis'' described the branch libraries' possibilities for poor urban children, who ''depend almost entirely upon what they receive from books for moral and mental stimulus.''

''Wildflowers - they rarely see them,'' the book stated. ''They never see the stars - the street lamps blind their eyes.''

Lord also designed a similar branch at 222 East 79th Street and ''New York 1900'' by Robert A.M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin and John Montague Massengale describe the Lord solution as ''an elegant town house . . . an icon of humanistic reason and a refuge from the turmoil of the city.''

In 1961, the Bloomingdale branch at 206 West 100th Street moved to a new building one block east and the old structure was sold to the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences, a research organization.

The American Academy was incorporated in 1950 by emigres fleeing Stalinist oppression and it has kept the original library interior intact, if only because of its shoestring budget, now barely $50,000 a year.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

The large, light reading rooms still have their oak furniture and varnished pine bookcases, but the building is now chock-a-block with Ukrainian artifacts, especially books and magazines like Dzvinok (Little Bell) and Dzvinochok (Tiny Bell), children's magazines published in Lvov in the 1930's, and the expatriate liberation journal Tryzub (Trident), published in Paris until 1941.

In 1986, the Landmarks Preservation Commission proposed the building for designation; as a work of architecture and as an early library structure it is of real interest. But at the hearing in November 1986, the academy's attorney, Stephen J. Jarema, resisted designation.

''Our people who were fortunate to escape from a police state are fully aware that once the government imposes a police power, no matter how innocent, it will not disappear, but grow in quest of more power,'' he said. ''Forced obedience will replace freedom.''

BUT the commission remained disposed toward designation and kept the matter open, even as the three-year deadline for designation neared. Meanwhile, Lionel Marks succeeded Mr. Jarema as attorney last year and re-examined the academy's position. Last month, he said that designation appeared to be ''a foregone conclusion.''

''It's pretty arbitrary, the way they designate,'' he said at the time. ''The average organization just cannot sustain a challenge.''

One small carrot offered by the commission is a grant program for nonprofit organizations that makes outright gifts of up to $10,000 for restoration, but only for designated landmarks.

The yearly deadline for grant applications is Oct. 17 - coincidentally, just before the three-year deadline of November 1989 - and there was pressure on the academy to make the application deadline by ending its opposition. Last month, after several conciliatory meetings with the commission, Mr. Marks and Prof. Yaroslav Bilinsky, the academy's president, faced the inevitable and began to investigate applications for preservation grants and loans. The designation was made on Aug. 29.

Now, said Professor Bilinsky, ''we'd like to do our share and maintain the building in good shape,'' indicating that the academy would apply for a grant. ''But at the same time our main concerns are to do scholarly work.''

We are continually improving the quality of our text archives. Please send feedback, error reports,
and suggestions to archive_feedback@nytimes.com.

A version of this article appears in print on September 24, 1989, on Page 10010012 of the National edition with the headline: STREETSCAPES: Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences; Landmarking an 1898 Library. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe